Obsidian Wings archive

Each time an Islamist terrorist commits some atrocity against us, it’s natural to be angry.

It’s also natural to be angry indiscriminantly at Muslims. Not honorable, but natural. Until reason kicks in, that is.

But as the War on Terror progresses, I’m seeing a trend whereby Americans can’t get past what they see as a fundamental faithlessness among so-called Moderate Muslims: Why don’t they decry this violence? Are we to take their silence as sanction?

Personally, this strikes me somewhat as laziness and xenophobia (we don’t need our fellow Americans marching in the street to tell us they don’t support the likes of Timothy McVeigh). But I’ve realized that listing dozens of links to moderate Muslim sites that do decry the atrocities will not convince anyone for whom this remains a problem. So I’m abandoning the quantitative approach. It’s a problem. But where does it come from?

Let me begin by acknowledging the perception: the Muslims of the world are not as vocal about these acts of terror as we want/need them to be.

Personally, this “silence,” such as it is, doesn’t confuse me. I put two and two together and figure if a military power like the US is unable to completely protect itself from these killers, let alone track them down and bring them to justice, how are the people of much poorer nations supposed to stand up to them? In other words, there’s a bit of fear at play here. I fully expect, however, that argument to issue in charges of cowardice, and that’s unfair to the brave Muslims I know (and some prominent Muslim thinkers strongly deny that’s it), so I took some time to look deeper.

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My defense of Rumsfeld provoked a fair number of fair critiques by the readership. Jesurgislac sums up one line of argument with the following:

Well, Von, this is what you said, quoted exactly: “What I do suggest is that torture and abuses are a routine and expected part of war, and that if there mere presence of torture and abuse in wartime was sufficient to require a cabinent-level firing, no Defense Secretary would last any war.”

How is this not saying that since it’s “routine and expected” that US solders will break the law (against torture), no Defense Secretary should be expected to enforce the law or be fired if he doesn’t?

I’d appreciate it if you would actually explain what you were saying here, rather than just let me keep trying to figure it out and telling me I’ve got it wrong.

Since I got tied up in other matters and didn’t respond much this critique or others, here’s another go at why, based on present evidence, Rumsfeld should stay.

Note: I intentionally leave out practical (perhaps Rumsfeld, flawed though he is, is the best person for the job) or political (firing Rumsfeld is a tacit admission by Bush that his Iraq policy is off track) concerns. This doesn’t mean that these concerns don’t exist — just that I’m feeling moralistic, not pragmatic, today.

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Hat tip to readers Victor Falk and JimPortlandOR for suggesting and providing information on this topic.
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the more you know the less you panic

I’m setting up this thread for the sharing of solid information about “dirty bombs” and what to do should one be detonated. A good source of key questions and answers is this thread from Vanderbilt University. This discussion also references a good overview published in the Washington Post a while back (I can’t find the article on the WP’s site, but the considerate Vanderbilt folks provide it on theirs). First two quotes below from that WP article.

Right to the most pressing question:

John Zielinski, professor of military strategy and operations at the National War College in Washington, estimates that, generally, someone a mile from the blast is likely to walk away unscathed. And “you could be within a couple hundred yards of it, and if you are upwind, you might not have a problem at all,” he says. “If they set it off in a street and you are one block over and behind a building, there might be no risk.”

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Prefatory Note: Despite the charges of cheapshotery my last attempt at this provoked, I’m going to dive head first into how much goodwill a touch of humility brings again. Given how Buddha-less the blogosphere has gotten over this torture scandal issue, let me note up front, for clarity, my driving concern here is the US’s image in the world (and how we need a good one to do right by Iraq), not Bush’s or Kerry’s image in the upcoming election.

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European allies are now even less enamored of our President than they were before the torture photos emerged. This is worrisome, given that before then, as a recent straw poll in Britain revealed, Bush was already pretty damn unpopular:

… perhaps the only surprising thing about the vehemence of anti-Bush feeling, based on a reading of newspapers, opinion polls and interviews around Europe, is how unsurprising it truly is. In fact, one reason the recent disclosures have proved so damaging to the American cause here is that Mr. Bush had so little good will upon which to draw. (emphasis mine)

This is not easily dismissed as transatlantic partisanship, unfortunately. Those polled here “were all Conservatives, by tradition and temperament the Republican Party’s natural friends across the Atlantic.”

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There seem to be two distinct camps in the debate on the War on Terror:

The Big War crowd argues that there are alliances and common interests among terrorist groups that extend far beyond al Qaida and anything short of total ideological warfare is doomed to failure (i.e., we’ll be targeted again unless we rip this worldwide threat out by its roots and destroy its ability to regenerate, and quickly).

The Little War crowd argues that we have a known, dangerous enemy, still at large, and we should have focussed our energies on targeting that enemy and its leader, so that we’re fighting one battle at a time, and fighting each one well (i.e., we’re using resources in Iraq that could be better used at the Afghanistan/Pakistan border).

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